Help upgrading my hard drive

[jabingla2810]

Im wanting to upgrade my macbook aluminium (late 2008) hard drive from 250GB to 500 GB.

I believe it has to be a 2.5" SATA drive, which i have found.

Now what im looking for is some (really) simple step by step instructions on how i go about doing the upgrade without loosing any of my stuff

Here's my current plan.

1. Back up everything onto an external hard drive using time machine.

2. ***** myself and be too scared to do anything for fear of loosing everything!

I obviously need a better plan than this.

Any help would be greatly apreciated!

 

[Hellhammer]

All you need is a backup. Just put the new drive in it, install OS X and restore from a TM backup. All your data will be in your old drive as well

 

[el-John-o]

You could also try using disk copy and mounting your new drive in a cheap 2.5" USB enclosure (newegg has them for $15), disk copy your existing drive to the new drive, swap, and boot. THEN you have an enclosure for your old 250GB drive so you can use it as an external drive, saves you a bit of time and gives you a nice little accessory!

Edit: Or a FireWire enclosure, if your model Macbook has FireWire. That will be MUCH quicker (sustained throughput is where FireWire is king, and copying the contents of your entire drive is pretty much the definition of sustained throughput!) If it were me, it'd be worth the extra few bucks over a USB enclosure.

 

[jabingla2810]

Thanks for the replies.... I have new RAM and a new HDD on the way.

I think im going to go down the time machine backup root.

One more question.

After installing the new hard drive, how do I then install snow leopard?

Is it just a case of turning it on and inserting the Snow Leopard disc?

And once this is done I presume I just plug my external HDD with my back up into the macbook and restoring?

Thanks again

 

[Dsync]

Right you are!!

Just pop OSX in and let it do the hard stuff for you. It will ask during setup if you want to migrate from a time machine, so just say yes. Then plug in your external TM and watch the magic happen! (Maybe grab some popcorn too)

 

[Propagator4]

Right you are!!

Just pop OSX in and let it do the hard stuff for you. It will ask during setup if you want to migrate from a time machine, so just say yes. Then plug in your external TM and watch the magic happen! (Maybe grab some popcorn too)

If I'm running Snow Leopard on my computer, do I need to insert a Snow Leopard disc when telling it to migrate from time machine? Or will Tiger, Jaguar, or Leopard work?

 

[Hellhammer]

If I'm running Snow Leopard on my computer, do I need to insert a Snow Leopard disc when telling it to migrate from time machine? Or will Tiger, Jaguar, or Leopard work?

Just run Migration Assistant that can be found from Applications > Utilities